By Kamal Peter, Senior Manager, Oracle Corporate Citizenship, India

One of the beauties of the Oracle Volunteering program is that it allows us to contribute to causes near and dear to our hearts. To me, one such cause is Girls in ICT Day. Celebrated on April 23 this year, Girls in ICT Day empowers and encourages girls and young women to pursue education and careers in technology fields. Having championed this cause with steadfast commitment for over five years, I was immensely delighted that the virtual Oracle Volunteering project, Next Gen Tech Girls: Poised for Success was selected to be part of the 24-Hour World Tour of ITU, the specialized United Nations agency for Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs).

 

The Oracle Volunteering project took the form of a three-day webinar series, bringing together 700 participants—young women enrolled in graduate and postgraduate courses across India. It was an honor to have Ms. Doreen Bogdan Martin, Director ITU, BDT join us from Geneva and share a message of encouragement, inspiration, and motivation with our participants.

The following statistics speak to why Girls in ICT Day is so important:

  • There is already a large gap in STEM/STEAM fields within higher education, and that gap widens in the employment sector.
  • Recruiters have indicated that female applicants account for less than 1% of the talent pool for trending technologies such as AI, Data Science, and Cloud.
  • Women make up less than 7% of ICT patent applicants.
  • The STEM pipeline still needs to be built from the bottom up. Few women reach boardrooms and leadership positions and are underrepresented at the frontiers of technology innovation.

Oracle is committed to advancing STEAM education, particularly among underserved groups. Each year, our objective through this celebration is to help young girls develop confidence in their technical abilities and to pursue careers associated with emerging technologies.

Our 15 Oracle Volunteers (pictured above) did an incredible job of motivating and encouraging the young participants. Oracle Volunteering Project Leader, Mandeep Gupta, deserves special credit for facilitating an engaging interaction among Oracle Volunteers and the participants.

The webinar series, which took place April 21-23, featured the following topics and subject area experts:

  • Information Security: Best Practices and Careers by Ashish Sharma, Director, India & Southeast Asia, Global Information Security
  • Cloud Technologies- Applications, Techniques and Careers by Hemant Bansal, Senior Member Technical Staff, Data Integration Cloud, OCI     
  • Agile Technologies and how it helps careers by Pavan Bheema, Senior Application Consultant, HCM Cloud Demo Engineering
  • Women and Entrepreneurship by Simi Joshi, Events and Marketing Lead APAC, Oracle for Startups 
  • Keynote by Midori Kawamukai, Sr. Manager Corporate Citizenship, JAPAC
  • Writing in a way to be noticed in the Digital World by Rajeshwari K Rai, Principal User Assistance Developer, Oracle PeopleSoft
  • Tech consulting as a career by Jyoti Kataria, Senior Manager, Customer Success Cloud Platform & Infrastructure   

Every year, Girls in ICT Day motivates me to continue championing this cause I care about (along with many more). In the same way, I hope our Next Gen Tech Girls event at Oracle provides the young women in attendance with the inspiration, resources, and encouragement they need to pursue their goals and further the causes they care about.